The Power of External Expertise for Sustainability Consulting

Mining is sometimes considered a true catch 22. It can be the main driver of long-term economic development which leads countries up the development ladder but can also be a cause of negative social impacts. Mining can result in environmental degradation, worker exploitation, health impacts and much more. Therefore, it is crucial that mining is aligned with sustainability. My client works in this domain and is leading sustainability reporting efforts to improve sustainability outcomes for this industry. Our project is to provide potential evidence of a correlation between sustainability reporting and sustainable impact within the mining industry and to do this, 5 global case studies are being developed evaluating select social and environmental criteria with those being health, water, and community impact

My role has been to focus on the social determinant of health, which is one of the most at-risk areas relative to mining. At first, I felt this would be straightforward, however the further I researched, the more it became clear that each criterion would need a very specific scope, otherwise finding potential correlations would be near impossible. I reviewed numerous topics from worker injuries to pollution-related health issues to even increases in vector-borne illnesses such as Zika around mining sites. Thankfully I didn’t have to decide alone, and I was able to draw on the experience and knowledge of my team. This teamwork allowed our group to develop a strong work plan for our project and begin advancing in our work. 

However, I have come to learn much about that consulting can seem like a rollercoaster. There are moments when you feel like you understand where you are going only to be caught off guard by a sudden twist which can leave one feeling upside down. That is not to say however that this experience has been an unpleasant one, but to say it has so far been an exhilarating one. I have learned much about the role of stakeholder engagement, the importance of feedback and teamwork within the consulting process. I have also come to understand better the difficulty that exists in a consulting project

The first major lesson I would like to discuss is the role of stakeholder engagement in the consulting process. Without question, stakeholder engagement is a crucial component to any consulting project, however I will be the first to admit that when working on a consulting project, it needs to be done with great frequency at an early stage. Within our group, we meet regularly with our client, but an error was made in only engaging with the client. We routinely took our work to the client and received positive feedback, yet it felt that we were lacking something. 

At this point, my group decided to sit-down with our professor to outline where we were with our work and what we needed to do. We presented where we were with the project and as a result of our proffesor’s feedback, realized that we had been selecting our evaluation criteria on the materiality reports of companies and not based on what literature was deemed to be most pressing. This resulted in us stopping where we were and returning to square one in order to ensure that we proposed relevant recommendations. Our team delved deeper into literature, reviewing dozens of case studies and academic articles in order to develop data-based recommendations. With this new research in hand, we returned to our client who was extremely impressed with the leaps made in our work. 

Now on a clear path supported by a literature-focused foundation, the project truly began to develop. Each team member harnessed their expertise to develop our selected criteria (which became 4 separate criteria given our clients feedback). We evaluated materiality reports, took time to understand why companies selected certain criteria, cross-referenced our work with other global reporting standards and in time, developed 4 solid evaluation criteria to help find evidence of a potential link between sustainability reporting and sustainable impact. This all led to the development of an evaluation framework that allocates points to companies based on certain reporting criteria. The framework will weigh certain questions and assess companies for a period of 5 years, and we hope that this mechanism will provide the evidence our client is looking for.

This leads me to my second point, that of feedback. While this has been discussed previously, I want to specifically address peer feedback. Last week, we were given the task of presenting our interim findings to the class yet were constrained to a time period of 10 minutes (which included time for questions). First thing I will say that this is far from enough time, as the same presentation we gave to our client lasted a whole hour. Therefore, we had to outline in nutshell terms who we were, what our project was, what we had achieved so far, and our reflections on the experience. This proved to be as much of a challenge as the project itself, yet I feel that our group developed a strong presentation and gave a solid explanation of our work. We were given feedback from other groups and while much of it was positive feedback, there was some degree of tough yet valid criticism. Issues of certain slides being too detailed or too heavy were leveled and these were valid concerns. Thankfully these comments were given to us prior to our client presentation thus we were able to reform our presentation to the client's needs.

With all this experience in hand, we have set out clear next steps. My group is now in the process of finalizing our evaluation metric and once this is complete, we will begin collecting individual mining company reporting data to determine if there may truly be a correlation between sustainability reporting and sustainability impact. All in all, these lessons learned are not consulting specific and can be applied across any sphere of work and therefore was a valuable reminder that sometimes it is the “perceived” simple things which can give the most difficult challenges. However, this has also been a reminder that we are not alone in this work. We have wonderful expertise all around us and we must not feel that we cannot reach out, especially when there are difficulties.